Criminal attorneys.In their effort to discredit President Donald Trump’s perceived enemies, close allies of the President have received key documents and information from a Ukrainian oligarch wanted in the U.S. on corruption charges [...] .
The information came from the legal team of Dmitry Firtash, a wealthy industrialist with assets across Europe, who has spent the last five years in Vienna fighting extradition to the U.S. on bribery and racketeering charges. The U.S. Department of Justice said in 2017 he was among the “upper echelon associates of Russian organized crime”—something Firtash vigorously denies, along with all charges against him.
[...]
In his frequent appearances on cable news, Giuliani has presented some of these documents to the American public as evidence for his claims of wrongdoing by Mueller and Biden. The key document is an affidavit from a former Ukrainian prosecutor who accuses Biden of corruption. “The witness I’m relying on,” Giuliani told Fox News on Oct. 6, was the prosecutor Viktor Shokin. “That’s the affidavit I put out,” Giuliani added. He did not mention that the affidavit was obtained by the Firtash legal team.
[...]
Over the last two months, a TIME investigation has traced some of Giuliani’s claims about Biden and Mueller to a troubling relationship, one in which a foreigner wanted by the U.S. government on corruption charges has taken steps, as part of his own legal strategy, that are helping the American President attack his most prominent critics.
This alignment of interests has taken shape at the same time, and with many of the same goals and actors, as the parallel effort by Trump and Giuliani to pressure Ukraine into investigating Biden’s family.
[...]
Firtash has established close ties to the former mayor of New York City in part by recruiting several of Giuliani’s associates. In July the oligarch hired two lawyers who have been helping Giuliani in his campaign to discredit Trump’s critics: Victoria Toensing and Joseph DiGenova, a married couple Trump considered hiring in 2018 as part of his private legal team. Best known as diehard defenders of Trump on Fox News, the couple has combed through the oligarch’s case files and used some of them in the effort to defend Trump on television and in the press.
Toensing and DiGenova then hired another Giuliani associate, Lev Parnas, to serve as their interpreter in communications with Firtash in Vienna [...] . The indictment against him alleges that Parnas and his business partners secretly channeled money from an unidentified Russian donor to various political causes and candidates.
[...]
In acting for Firtash, Toensing and DiGenova’s stated aim has been to prevent their client’s extradition to the U.S.
Time
Not unless they knew what he would say would be a lie. Otherwise, it's simply a flipping ploy, which is not illegal.They claimed that one of Mueller’s top deputies in the special counsel investigation, Andrew Weissmann, offered to drop the bribery case against Firtash in 2017 in exchange for testimony that could be damaging to President Trump. This, they claimed, would amount to suborning perjury.
Because they don't have any.They declined to provide documents to back up those claims.
There is nothing normal about having to investigate a president for conspiracy against the United States.In a piece published on July 22, John Solomon, a columnist for the Hill, cited documents from the Firtash legal team to suggest that Weissmann’s attempts to turn Firtash were “wrapped with complexity and intrigue far beyond the normal federal case.”
Sarah Kendzior is right...the world is run by a global crime syndicate masquerading as distinct governments.Documents from the Firtash case have become even more useful to Giuliani and Trump as they roll out their response to the impeachment inquiry. At the center of Giuliani’s counterattack so far is the affidavit signed by Shokin, Ukraine’s former prosecutor general, which alleges that Biden caused Shokin’s dismissal in order to stop a corruption probe into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board of that company for about five years, reportedly earning $50,000 a month.
“I was forced to leave office, under direct and intense pressure from Joe Biden and the U.S. Administration,” in order to stop that investigation, Shokin said in the affidavit, which was notarized in Kiev on Sept. 4.
These claims have not stood up to scrutiny. Officials in the U.S. and Ukraine, as well as independent experts and investigative journalists, have said Shokin was fired because of his lax approach to fighting corruption.
[...]
But Giuliani’s defense of Trump amid the impeachment inquiry has relied heavily on the statement that Firtash’s legal team obtained from Shokin.
[...]
By the time the Department of Justice publicly referred to him in 2017 as a senior associate of the Russian mob, Firtash had been under investigation in the U.S. for more than a decade, according to interviews with his investigators.
His alleged ties to the Russian mafia go back to the early 2000s, when his work in the gas trade brought him into contact with Semyon Mogilevich, one of the most notorious leaders in the world of Russian organized crime.
[...]
By the mid-2000s, Firtash had established himself as a partner to the Kremlin in the European gas trade. With the approval of Russian President Vladimir Putin, his company had won exclusive rights to buy natural gas from Russia and resell it in Ukraine. Firtash owned about half of the company, while Gazprom, the Russian state gas monopoly, owned the other half. The arrangement made Firtash a billionaire.
[...]
Firtash then bought up factories across Ukraine, especially in the chemicals and fertilizer industries, which helped make him an important powerbroker. In the presidential elections of 2010, he backed the Kremlin’s preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych [...] .
[...]
Working alongside Firtash in that campaign was the American political operative Paul Manafort, who helped engineer the Yanukovych victory. As the elections approached, Firtash and Manafort also pursued some business deals on the side.
[...]
But [Firtash's] luck began to run out in February 2014, when violent street protests forced President Yanukovych to flee to Russia.
A month later, Firtash was arrested near his mansion in Vienna on an arrest warrant issued by the FBI. The warrant accused him of organizing a scheme to bribe officials in India for the right to mine titanium. Because some of the metal was to be sold to a Chicago-based company, the District Attorney in that city claimed jurisdiction in the case under a law known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
[...]
Since he was released on bail in Vienna in 2014–after paying a bond of $174 million–Firtash hired a formidable team of lawyers to stop his extradition from Vienna to Chicago. Among them is Michael Chertoff, the former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, as well as a former Austrian Justice Minister. Perhaps the most outspoken member of the legal team has been Lanny Davis, the former counsel to President Bill Clinton.
Just blowing smoke? Otherwise, I'd think Trump's DOJ butt buddy, Bill Barr, would have put a priority on getting Firtash back here.Over the last five years, this team managed to slow the extradition process, but could not stop it. The case appeared to come to a head in early June, when Firtash’s chief attorney in Chicago, Dan Webb, filed a motion warning that his client could be extradited in a matter of weeks.
Firtash’s lawyers [...] told TIME in June that the extradition looked imminent, and they were preparing to defend Firtash before a jury in Chicago. They also said, however, that they were ready to produce evidence that would embarrass officials from the Obama Administration. “This will be very tough against the previous Administration,” one of Firtash’s lawyers said at the end of June. “With the current Administration, I think they will like it.”
Sounds to me like Trump's team of dirty lawyers are making sure Firtash stays in Vienna.Since 2017, Toensing and DiGenova have been among Trump’s most avid defenders on cable news in the fight against the Mueller investigation and other probes.
[...]
The pair have also worked closely with Giuliani in recent months. In early May, Toensing was due to join Giuliani on a trip to Kiev, where the two lawyers intended to pressure the new government in Ukraine to investigate the Biden family, according to a May 9, 2019, report in the New York Times. But the reporting about their plans caused such an uproar among Congressional Democrats that the two decided to cancel their trip.
On July 24, Firtash’s lawyers in Vienna informed TIME of a dramatic change in his legal team: Davis, the former counsel to President Clinton, would no longer be working for Firtash.
[...]
One of the reasons for his departure, according to two people close to Firtash, was that Davis had been representing Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, since July 2018. That relationship had made Davis an enemy of Trump.
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It would have been difficult after that for Davis to get along with Firtash’s new lawyers, Toensing and DiGenova, who joined the legal team in late July [...] .
[...]
Alongside Toensing and DiGenova, another long-time Republican operative began representing Firtash in July: Mark Corallo, the former spokesman for Trump’s private defense team during the Mueller investigation.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
UPDATE:
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